Dick Gregory will be greatly missed. Humbly, and in his stead, 'Turn Me Loose' carries on to be his voice and his inspiration for all who wish to laugh at the absurdity of racism and be enlightened by his spirit of justice.
My whole career has been a landmark. So I don't think about the pressure too much. I just go out and do, because I believe in it.
When you give your children certain life lessons, and they come and ask you for additional advice, you say to yourself, 'I've done my job,' and you'll continue to do your job.
My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.
I don't know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who's given monologue after monologue in a television series.
We live in a world where racism hasn't changed at all. It's that old thing of, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.
Everyone does what they believe they need to do in order to survive in this business, 'survive' being the operative word.
In most science-fiction pictures, the black guy is either an engineer or a radio operator, and he is the first guy killed - gone from the movie.
With Trump, because of the kind of seemingly violent way that he talks about things and because he's on Twitter almost every single morning, I think it brings down the respect that we have for the White House and for the Oval Office in particular, so the expectation is anything can happen, and that becomes the norm, which is unfortunate.
In the case of Papa Pope, certainly he's making his daughter's world and the world of the republic a much better place.
I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.
It's a very different thing when you're creating the world as opposed to when you're just part of the world. I love the detail of it, the problem-solving of it, and I love working with actors.
Proof' is going to be, in many ways, a mystery. It's not a procedural in any way. It's not a medical drama. It really is about trying to investigate whether or not there's life after death.
Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.
When we were bringing 'Raisin' onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time - it was 1973, '74 - and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.
The argument for '12 Years a Slave' was that - yes, it's a beautiful film. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted. It's a real story, and these stories should be told. The problem is, if they're the only stories being told, then it makes Americans of African descent - it puts them into that victim category. And that was my problem with the movie.
I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.
When I first came into New York City, what I did was, I didn't have very much money, and I couldn't afford pictures or a resume, so what I used to do is I would tear off the back of a matchbook, and I'd write my name and telephone number on the back of the matchbook.